What is in other galaxies?

Your line of thinking, forgive me, is exactly what’s wrong with the depiction of alien worlds in Hollywood. The thinking goes along the lines of, ‘’It’s like Earth… but weeeird!’’ And so almost every alien ever put on film looks just like us, with arms, hands, forward-facing eyes, maybe with an extra limb or horns stuck on there. I never went to see Avatar for just that reason – I want to see something ALIEN when I watch aliens, not tall blue humans.

When I think of life on other worlds, I think of things truly otherworldly, not just predictable offshoots of Earth life. DNA is only one of a trillion possible ways to store the information that makes life possible, after all, and it was only by sheer accident that that’s what we ended up using. Maybe another planet uses silicon instead of carbon as the basic building block, making a world of living rock, veins of sentient iron burrowing into the planet with life cycles of billions of years.

We can use light to relay information, right? Why can’t a cell? Or a cluster of cells? Why couldn’t you land on a planet to find clouds of living light conversing though pulses of microwaves? How about every atom of the planet itself gradually gets reorganized into a biological computer, gaining self awareness and spinning round and round, everything to see and nowhere to go. How about life that evolved in the skies of a gas giant, floating around forever and never landing? How about living aroma? How about the planets close to the center of the galaxy where the stars are packed tightly together? Can you imagine the radiation those planets are bombarded with? The mutations there would be occurring at hyperspeed.

The only movie that ever came close to realizing what it will truly will probably be like to contact alien life was The Blob. That guy was an alien alien, not a tiny person with big eyes.

Rant over.